Julian Hochberg

Hochberg was born on July 10, 1923.[2] A native of New York City, he attended City College of New York and graduated in 1945 with an undergraduate degree in physics. At City College, Hochberg was influenced by studying perception with psychologist Gardner Murphy. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he was taught by influential figures like Edward Tolman, Egon Brunswik, and Gordon Lynn Walls.[2]

After graduate school, Hochberg became an instructor at Cornell University and was promoted to full professor by 1960. He was a professor at New York University between 1965 and 1969 before moving to Columbia University, where he finished his teaching career.[3]

In the 1950s, Hochberg led a study that examined how college students judged qualities like cuteness and intelligence based on physical features.[4] The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, found that college students studied in the same year showed consistency in judging facial expressions, but students from a given year tended not to agree with students studied in other years. This suggested that over time there are trends in judging people. Hochberg found that there was an exception to the discrepancies seen in students from different years: judgments of the cuteness of babies tended to remain stable over time.[5]

Hochberg died on May 22, 2022, at the age of 98.[6]

Hochberg received the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association.[7] He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980.[8] In 2000, he received the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists.[9]

• In the Mind's Eye: Julian Hochberg on the Perception of Pictures, Films, and the World. Oxford University Press, 2007.